Yes I don't understand why so many people are anti Bose in these comments. This is the right way to do things, and more companies should be encouraged to do so.

That battle for whatever its worth is over. Wayland won. X is legacy. Anyone still relying on X is on a dying ship refusing to get off and shaking their fist at rescue boats trying to help them.

What ever MS does is by definition blessed and correct, as they have the application that Libreoffice is trying to work with. Now it sucks that MS is so difficult to work with, but thats the price you pay. Libreoffice on its own terms with no ms compatibility is just fine. Not great. Not as good as Office 2003 but better than office 95. So a better version of 1997. Yeah, I'd put it there more or less.

You shouldn't be that impressed. Microsoft has spent a lot of time and money making it send minimal data, and optimizing the java script. And libreoffice.. it hasn't had a lot of love in a while. It works well for what I need it to, but I don't have the time and energy to refactor it to work more performant. I just live with it.

I don't bother with romance novels (they're usually about abusers being rewarded for being abusers, and not really my cup of tea even when they aren't), but AI is not great at translation, is terrible at metaphor, and is horrific at writing.

If they're going to use AI for auto-translation, then I think the best thing they can do is pay for the first 30 sessions of therapy needed afterwards.

Over-reliance on an unreliable source is stupid.

Britain has plenty of brilliant minds and is more than capable of building services equal, or superior, to those in the US. It honestly isn't hard - I've worked in the US tech sector and their minds are nowhere near up to scratch. Those that are are overworked, underpaid, and essentially beholden to their employer because the US is a "good ol' boy's club" where executives abuse power and authority on a regular basis. This is not a good way to run a reliable, competent, business.

Hell, give me the seed money and I'll set up an damn cloud provider that can beat the carp out of those in the US. I've been in this business longer than most of the techies working on the US cloud infrastructure but I'm also not blinded by the naive assumptions and political intrigues that have defined the sector thus far.

That's partly why I only buy Thinkpads - for the mouse with the 3 buttons (and I disable the trackpad).
But what you want is easily achievable by either xinput or xmodmap.

We passed Idiocracy some time back. We're now in a region where satirists and humourists are simply no longer able to function without sounding saner.

True, but to be fair, the scientists, engineers, and scholars are largely fleeing the country, the tech industry is in a massive slump (agriculture is the only sector growing jobs according to the last reliable official figures), and there's a political need to create the impression that the country isn't in a bad way.

This is horrifying, terrifying, and sadly well-known even to those who superficially monitor such things.

Popular media: More than one US film/tv studio has "lost" or "suffered a mysterious fire" in un-digitised archives, destroying the lot, during battles to preserve. The BBC sued Bob Monkhhouse for preserving material it destroyed. In Britain, it has been no better. Fans of the British TV series "The Avengers" can only see old episodes because armies of previous fans descended on rubbish tips and, at great risk to themselves, collected as much film as possible.

General history: Places like the John Ryland's Library and the British Library have suffered with rescuing archives at risk of becoming submerged or destroyed by mould. The Archimedes Palimpsest was partially destroyed by one collector filling in the pictures with coloured pens and by another collector allowing the book to be severely damaged by mould.

The National Archives have mysteriously "lost" a great many files over the years and are only digitising those they've retained at an incredibly slow rate. I know because I've personally forked out several hundred to get just two scanned, all because politicians far prefer frippery to archiving. We've absolutely no idea how many of the manuscripts held in other archives are still in usable condition because nobody bothers to check.

It's not just limited to archives, of course. The US has, over the last couple of decades, demolished numerous buildings within the US that are over 300 years old because malls produce profit and ancient structures don't. (They also then complain they have no history...) The Space Shuttle is to be taken to Texas for a PR stunt, which will require it being dismantled and those things aren't designed for that. There is no guarantee any of it will survive the journey. All because PR matters and preservation does not. Other countries? The Louvre... well... probably best not to talk about that utter disgrace. In Egypt, 3000 year old gold artefacts are routinely melted down so the conservators can pocket some extra cash.

It's at times like this that Kenny Everett's general comes to mind.

Well, the obvious ones:

No built-in instruction-level or block-level parallelism
Array/vector operations are highly inefficient
Multiprocessing is pretty feeble
No CSP, you have to use OS primitives which are often unsafe
No formal contract system, best you can do is show statements don't do anything bad, you can't show functions do what you intend
Heavy software verification is difficult to impossible

That reminds me, I should really invent a language called "browns" so that Microsoft can put a # at the start.

On the other hand, Microsoft trying to write an OS in Rust will reveal absolutely every defect present in the language.

Unless they write their own, which is quite likely as they'd rather have defects they can ignore.

Abandon hope, all ye who press enter here.

I really do think coding using AI tools is a bit faster, at least it seems that way to me. As most of the morning but lengthy work can be done faster by AI.

But I am also pretty sure it's VERY easy to rapidly incur technical debt, especially if you are telling AI to review its own work. Yeah it will do some stuff but who is to say post review fixes it's really better?

More than ever I think the right approach to coding with AI is to build up carefully crafted frameworks that are solid (maybe use AI to help but review and tests very carefully) then allow AI to build on top of solid fundamental structures that you know are solid, and do not let the AI modify those - maybe let it ask for feature requests.